2011 SBN Baseball Awards: Clayton Kershaw, Roy Halladay Share NL Cy Young

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a tie! With 149 points each, Clayton Kershaw and Roy Halladay will each take home a share of our National League Cy Young Award.

Interestingly, the leader in xFIP in Cliff Lee comes in third by a rather wide gap, but it's easy to see how that could develop given how the votes were distributed (an astounding 75% of voters had him marked at third). Meanwhile, Halladay and Kershaw split the rest of the vote in two, and it's easy to understand why. Each dominated the league with a 2.35 and 2.28 ERA respectively, and did so largely on their own merits. Kershaw was amongst the league's best at striking batters out with 9.57 per nine innings, while Halladay did his usual thing mixing a strong K-rate with an unreasonably low walk rate. Allowing just 1.35 per nine, the Philadelphia ace was the best in the league at avoiding the free pass.

The Cy Young Award has only once before ended in a tie, with Mike Cuellar and Denny McClain taking home the American League honors in 1969. It will be interesting to see if that plays out again; these two men will certainly be hard to separate either way.